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Thursday, August 15, 2013

Increase Efficiency with Veeam Backup and Replication v7

Announced in June, the new and improved Veeam Backup and Replication version 7 was engineered to make backups of virtual machines more efficient. Designed for both VMware and Microsoft virtualized environments, Veeam Backup and Replication v7 features seven major modifications and approximately 50 minor tweaks.

Of all of these changes, there are three that seem to be the most promising in terms of expanding Veeam’s existing customer base: built-in Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration, long-term retention to tape, and backup from storage snapshots.

The built-in WAN acceleration offered by Veeam Backup and Replication v7 boasts an improvement of up to 50 times the speed of a traditional file copy across the WAN by decreasing the amount of data sent across the connection. By pre-determining what data blocks are already there and sending less data, the process is much quicker and more efficient.

The primary advantages offered by Veeam Backup and Replication v7’s support for long-term retention to tape is the ability to tier levels of backup by archiving long-term data and moving it to cheaper storage. This feature was largely brought about by customer demand, and allows Veeam to perform this function in house, where in the past they would have had to work with a partner.

Last but not least, Veeam Backup and Replication v7 dramatically improves recovery point objectives (RPOs) with backup from storage snapshots. Backup from storage snapshots also significantly reduces the impact that backup activities have on the production environment by enabling a backup process to keep a virtual machine snapshot for only a brief moment, resulting in instant VM snapshot commit. Unlike existing snapshot backup solutions, Veeam leverages VMware changed block tracking (CBT) to greatly reduce backup time for incremental backups. Currently, Veeam’s backup from storage snapshot feature is only available with HP StoreVirtual Storage and HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage products; however, Veeam’s engineers are hard at work with other storage vendors to expand compatibility.